Akros Silicon has just announced the availability of the AS1860, the latest SoC energy management IC of the company’s GreenEdge family. The AS1860 SoC and provide 60W and above (up to 90W) of power via Ethernet (PoE) to Powered Device (PD) applications such as thin clients, monitors, industrial Ethernet, IPTV, building management, Industrial Networking and many other high power designs.

The company has showcased their solution at Electronica 2012, using a demo with a power sourcing equipment featuring Broadcom BCM59111 which can power up to 64 devices (4 per BCM59111 IC, but they can be cascaded to power 64 nodes) and a powered device (laptop) featuring their AS1860 chipset.

Higher power conversion efficiency due to communication across the isolation barrier

More accurate output-voltage sensing using a resistor-divider sensor on the secondary side

I suppose you probably won’t use this technology at home, but it could start to show up in offices where only one CAT cable is used to carry data and power to workstations or other devices that can run with 60 to 90 W power.

The AS1860 SoC is available in a 64-pin 9×9 QFN package, and costs $4.69 per unit in 3K quantities.